1. Technical Field
The present invention generally relates to charge accounts and in particular to security of and control over charge account use. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to account holder control over charge authorizations using charge account numbers.
2. Description of the Related Art
A major obstacle to broad public acceptance and use of e-business is reluctance of consumers to reveal their credit or debit card numbers over the Internet due to security concerns, both real and perceived. One fear is interception of the card number by a third party, although secure socket layer (SSL) encryption employed in secure Internet transactions renders such interception extremely improbable. However, the perception on the part of account holders remains.
Another concern, one having much more basis in reality, involves automatic renewal and rebilling by an enterprise upon expiration of a membership subscription. Although reputable businesses offer procedures to cancel membership subscriptions, the risk of either a potential argument over cancellation or an error or delay in cancellation, while rebilling continues, is enough to prevent some consumers from even considering using their charge accounts on the Internet.
Various methods have been employed or proposed for improving security and reducing the risk of unauthorized rebilling in charge account use. “Single use” charge account numbers, for example, employ numbers associated with an account which are only valid for a single charging activity. After the account number has been used once, charging authorization on that account number is denied for all subsequent charge requests. This approach, however, places a tremendous burden on the existing credit card numbering scheme since only a finite range of unique numbers exists. Single use account numbers would quickly run through the entire range of permutations. Much larger ranges of numbers than are currently employed would be required for this solution to be practical.
An alternative solution involves adding prefixes or suffixes to existing account numbers to create single use account numbers for that account. However, this requires a larger number of digits for account numbers than are currently employed (typically sixteen) to uniquely identify an account, which would cause much existing software depending on the current number of digits within account numbers to function improperly. Moreover, while single use account charging activity is desirable in some situations, modification of all charging activity to involve single use account numbers is not desirable for many types of transactions.
It would be desirable, therefore, to enable an account holder to establish single use charging functionality for an account in selected situations, while retaining the ability to generally employ unrestricted charging transactions in other situations. It would further be advantageous for the account holder to be able to establish such single use limitations either before or after the charging transaction.